Curious about a Latin (?) Translation from a novel

[balloonhat]

I just finished a book in which the first chapter has two instances of Latin (?), one of which is never translated. I'm curious what it means, if anything. The novel is set in 640 AD.

"He begins by bemoaning your excessive sensationalism, and then writes, 'Ut turpiter atrum destinat in piscem mulier formosa superne---" (The character is

Comments

[jo_nzl]

They're quotes from Horace's Ars Poetica: Ut turpiter atrum destinat in piscem mulier formosa superne ("so that, in an ugly fashion, a beautiful woman might end in a black fish below"), comes right at the beginning of the poem (lines 3-4). The whole sentence reads:

Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam
iungere si velit et varias inducere plumas
undique conlatis membris, ut turpiter atrum
desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne,
spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici?

If a painter should wish to join a horse's neck to a human head, and join various plumage to limbs brought together everywhere, so that, in ugly fashion, a beautiful woman might end in a black fish below, who, admitted to the spectacle, would be able to hold back their laughter, friends?

Essentially, he's saying that, just as painters shouldn't paint fantastical sights like a woman with a fish's tail, so should poets follow certain rules of composition (which he spends the rest of the poem expounding).

inceptis gravibus plerumque et magna professis
purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter
adsuitur pannus ("to weighty beginnings and things grandly proclaimed, one or two bits of purple cloth are often sewn on, which may shine widely")

is lines 14-16 of the same poem.

Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus, is line 139. The ut proicit ampullus bit seems to be from line 97, though the text of the Latin I have reads ampullas, not ampullus. The context is:

Telephus et Peleus cum pauper et exsul uterque
proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba,
si curat cor spectantis tetigisse querella.

Telephus and Peleus, as beggar as exile, eschew bombast and sesquipedian verses, if their complaints care to touch the heart of the spectator.

Weird that the "ut proicit ampullas" ("so that he may eschew bombast") gets tacked onto the bit about the purple passages, as surely purple passages epitomise bombast! Though I haven't read the book, so don't know about the context!

[balloonhat]

Ah, thank you! The book treated the Latin bits as if quoting a critical letter about one of the character's memoirs. Lots of the quoted stuff in the past has been bits of texts/poems, but I don't know why it didn't occur to me that it wasn't the case here.

Thank you for enlightening about this!